Nigeria’s fight against corruption boosts its leadership role— DFID

The United Kingdom (UK) Department for International Development (DFID) on Monday said that Nigeria was set for leadership and accountability roles due to its dogged fight against corruption.

Mr Richard Ough, Team Leader and Senior Economic Adviser of the organisation, said this while declaring open a capacity building workshop on financial auditing.

The workshop was organised by the Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation, in partnership with DFID and the UK National Audit Office (NAO).

Ough said the UK realised that for Nigeria’s anti-corruption fight to succeed, it needed to help build the capacity of the personnel that would make it happen.

“This is the UK’s collaboration with Nigeria on the anti-corruption agenda.

“It was a build-up to the summit held in London in May where President Buhari and our former Prime Minister set out to collaborate on the anti-corruption agenda.

“It’s a long term effort for us to try and partner with the auditors to build their capability’’, he said.

The team leader said that the workshop was the third mission the UK had embarked on so far and that there was provision for more next year.

He added that as far as there was political will and willingness for reforms by Nigeria, the UK would continue to provide the capacity.

The NAO team leader, Bea Onabanjo, said the workshop would take the participants beyond just testing transactions to controls and irregularities of transactions.

She said that the aim was to make the auditors better and bring them up to international standards which would help improve the economy of the country.

The Acting Auditor-General of the Federation, Mrs Florence Anyanwu, said that the agency had always worked towards minimising corruption and that the training was going to help improve the process of fighting corruption.

“This particular training is focusing on the planning stages which is one of the places we feel that we have gaps in the way we manage our audits.

“It is going to make a lot of improvements on methodology, evidence gathering and documentation.’’

She said that the agency was doing performance audit and that it had done a lot of pilot performance audit which was about efficiency in economy and effectiveness of government projects and policies.

She said that it would help government in terms of policies that had been taken.

“It helps them to re-assess and give them assurances if those policies are working according to their plans.

“So far we have done pilot audits which are very impressive; we hope that in the beginning of 2017, we would be able to submit two or three performance audits to the National Assembly.’’

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop, being attended by 24 participants, will close on Friday. (NAN)